Kant e o cinema transcendental: um debate acerca das relações espaço-temporais no cinema a partir de Theodor W. Adorno e Immanuel Kant

Abstract

The objective of this work is to reflect on space-time relations in the cinema from the epistemological theory and the theory of the taste of Immanuel Kant, having as privileged interlocutor the frankfurtian thinker Theodor W. Adorno. More specifically, the study looks at how these spatio-temporal relations influence in the greater or lesser spontaneity and autonomy of the mental faculties of the spectators. The guiding thread of the analysis proposed here is the doctrine of schematism formulated by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. There, we verify that the Kantian transcendental subject is marked by the spontaneity with which he synthesizes objective experience, which gives him the power to format the experience of objects in time and space from the their own instances, that is, instances whose origin lies a priori and innately in the subject itself. However, this protagonism in the determination of the objective experience played by the Kantian transcendental subject seems to be contradicted by cinema, insofar as the space-time relations present in a film are conditioned by the cinematographic production itself. From this point of view we can find in some texts of Adorno, Benjamin, and Horkheimer the idea that the modes with which the subject constitutes his objective experience are themselves conditioned by instances that escape the subject. The cinema, understood as a mere industrial product, appears in Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment as an external instance to the subject that can, by mobilizing its internal determinants, expropriates its ability to schematize and, just because of this, can expropriates also the spontaneity of its judgments, conditioning them in function of a market demand. We believe, however, that the own way in which the activity of schematizing acts in the Kantian judgment of taste, namely, free of conceptual or empirical determinations, may point to a cinematographic experience which, contrary to that provided by the entertainment industry, would have the capacity to reinforce a more spontaneous, reflexive and autonomous use of the mental faculties of the spectators. This possibility, however, rests on the condition that we treat the elements present in the Kantian theory of taste from a dialectical materialist point of view, that is, from the point of view of the primacy of the object, as we can find in Theodor W. Adorno.